Author Archives: LutherCKAF

This Year’s Hottest Destination for GOP Candidates Is the Mexican Border

by LutherCKAF Posted on March 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will visit the US-Mexico border on Friday with Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Walker, who is considering a run for president, is aiming to bolster his credentials as a critic of President Obama’s immigration policies. A photo wouldn’t hurt either.

The Mexican border is now an almost mandatory pit stop for Republican politicians (especially presidential aspirants) looking for the aura of on-the-ground experience on immigration. Sure, talking to a rancher, staring across a river, and visiting a detention facility in McAllen for 30 minutes might not offer much of a big-picture perspective. But that hasn’t stopped lawmakers from surveying the region in gunboats, ATVs, helicopters, and jeeps—invariably with camera crews in tow. Here’s a roundup:

Former Gov. Rick Perry: As governor of Texas for 14 years, Perry had plenty of opportunities to work on his border game face, and it shows:

I’m on a boat. Rick Perry/Flickr

That’s some electric-fence-with-alligator-moat level intimidation. Let’s zoom in:

Rick Perry/Flickr

Here’s Perry on that same trip with Fox News host Sean Hannity on the set of Rambo on the Rio Grande last summer:

Sen. Marco Rubio: The Florida senator may take a hit from some conservatives for his support for a path to citizenship for some undocumented residents, but he demonstrated his ability to look stern while gazing into the great unknown on this visit to El Paso in 2011:

Sen. Marco Rubio

Gov. Bobby Jindal: Last November, Louisiana’s chief executive toured the Mexican border by boat and helicopter in the hopes of better understanding the child migrant crisis, which by that point had already subsided. Jindal’s entourage didn’t come away empty-handed: “In at least three locations, we saw where people were trying to make their way into Texas in an unimpeded manner,” boasted one member of Jindal’s group.

Gov. Bobby Jindal/Facebook

Sen. Ted Cruz: Texas’ junior senator has made more visits to Iowa than he has to South Texas, his state’s poorest region (much to locals’ chagrin). But last year, as media interest in the child migrant crisis peaked, he took the time to visit the border and tour a migrant processing facility in McAllen with former Fox News personality Glenn Beck:

Toured the border and spent time with Glenn Beck, @sentedcruz and @replouiegohmert over the weekend. Learned and saw a lot. We must secure our border. #AmericaFirst

A photo posted by Randy Weber (@txrandy14) on Jul 21, 2014 at 6:30am PDT

For now, the rest of the field is playing catch-up. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee visited the border in Texas during his 2008 campaign (joined at the Rio Grande by action star Chuck Norris) but has not been back since. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has not visited the border, although he did propose building a fence along New Hampshire’s southern border to keep out people from Massachusetts. Acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon Ben Carson recently visited the Israeli border, where he mistook construction equipment for machine gun fire.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie may be the only potential candidate who has avoided the border on principle. Although he visited Mexico City on a trade mission in 2014, he balked at extending his trip to the Rio Grande—which is very far from both Mexico City and New Jersey. “This is silliness,” he told NJ.com. “If I went down there and looked at it, what steps am I supposed to take exactly? Send the New Jersey National Guard there?”

It’s not just potential Republican candidates getting in on the action. In recent years, the Rio Grande has been a frequent destination for DC’s finest. In 2013, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)—who is not running for president—watched law enforcement apprehend a woman who had scaled the 18-foot border fence in Nogales. That same year, while aboard a speed boat with two Republican colleagues, Rep. Leonard Lance (R-N.J.) found a body floating in the Rio Grande. (“It was a vivid reminder that we have to secure our border and do it as quickly as possible,” he told Roll Call.) Last year, Rep. Steve Stockman (R-Texas) traveled to McAllen accompanied by writer (and birther) Jerome Corsi and a film crew from conspiracy website WorldNetDaily. The crew showed up unannounced at a DHS detention center at midnight and was not allowed in.

Still, Walker is smart to get his border-fence photo-op out of the way early—it may not be there much longer. If elected president, real-estate mogul Donald Trump (who has not visited the border) has pledged to personally supervise the construction of a new barrier along the southern border that will permanently end illegal immigration. “A wall,” he told Iowa voters last week. “A real wall…not a wall that people walk over.”

President Trump’s 2020 challengers may have to visit the Canadian border instead.

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This Year’s Hottest Destination for GOP Candidates Is the Mexican Border

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It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"

by LutherCKAF Posted on May 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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There are few things more symbolic of our climate dysfunction than the strange idea that if only we gave the problem a different name, we’d be able to deal with it. Nonetheless, for years there have been intimations that we should cease saying “global warming” and instead say “climate change”—albeit for wildly different reasons.

The case for this phrase change dates at least back to an infamous 2002 memo by conservative strategist Frank Luntz, who argued that “while global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge.” Luntz was giving this advice in the context of also advising Republicans to highlight the “lack of scientific certainty” about climate change. In a study published in 2011, however, researchers at the University of Michigan actually found that Republicans seem to be more willing to accept the reality of the problem when the “climate change” label was used.

Most recently, however—and as Media Matters documents in the helpful video below—conservatives have seized on the bizarre idea that the environmental movement is now saying “climate change” because it can explain anything, including “decades of global cooling,” as one Fox News host claimed. In other words, the accusation is that this a sneaky way to cover up the reality that global warming is a sham.

Here at Climate Desk, we’ve used the terms pretty much interchangeably. So have scientists. From a scientific perspective, after all, both phrases have validity. There’s no doubt that the single clearest indicator of what carbon dioxide emissions are doing to our planet is a global warming trend. At the same time, though, this trend results in much more than just warming. From changes in rainfall patterns to potential jet stream alterations, the term “climate change” certainly captures a broader range of consequences. In fact, NASA argues, on this basis, that it’s the preferable term.

But which term should we use from a public opinion perspective? What’s the better frame? Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who is currently serving as the Gallup scholar for the environment, has just published a comprehensive polling analysis suggesting that basically, it’s a wash. “The public responds to global warming and climate change in a similar fashion,” writes Dunlap. For instance: When you show people a list of environmental problems and ask if they personally worry about each one “a great deal, a fair amount, only a little, or not at all,” 34 percent say they worry a great deal about global warming, and 35 percent say the same about climate change.

The more pertinent issue, though, is whether ideological groups respond differently to different phrasings. Dunlap looked at that too. Breaking responses down by ideology, he found that only 16 percent of Republicans say they worry a great deal about “global warming”…and only 17 percent say the same for “climate change.” In the other three possible response categories—a fair amount, only a little, not at all—the results were also quite similar, as you can see in the table below.

Gallup.

In sum, 36 percent of Republicans worried a great deal or a fair amount about “global warming,” and 39 percent worried a great deal or a fair amount about “climate change.” By contrast, 83 percent of Democrats worried either a great deal or a fair amount about both “global warming” and “climate change.”

“While there are slight differences in the degree of partisan and ideological divergence in responses to global warming versus climate change,” Dunlap concludes in his paper, “they are not statistically significant, and modest compared with the huge gaps in views of both terms held by Americans at the two ends of the political spectrum.”

That’s not to say there wasn’t a time, perhaps as recently as mid-2009 (when the data were collected for the Michigan study cited above), when conservatives were indeed more open to taking the problem seriously if it was labeled “climate change” rather than “global warming.” But if so, those days are long gone. Dunlap suggests that this is because conservatives have gotten just as used to dismissing “climate change” as they are to dismissing “global warming.” Certainly, the name bestowed upon their favorite pseudo-scandal, late 2009’s “ClimateGate,” didn’t help matters.

Nor does the right’s cynical new idea that the climate crowd shifted to saying “climate change” in order to paper over a supposed lack of warming. “In recent years a popular meme on skeptic and conservative blogs is that climate scientists and climate policy advocates have shifted to climate change because it refers to abnormally cold as well as warm weather and is thus harder to dispute—even though climate scientists have used both terms from the late 1980s onward,” comments Dunlap by email. “The result is that in conservative circles climate change has become as politicized as global warming, and the two terms now seem synonymous.”

So, in sum: If you thought clever word-smithing was going to save the planet, forget about it. It doesn’t matter what you call it: It’s getting a lot hotter.

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It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on It Doesn’t Matter Whether You Call It "Global Warming" or "Climate Change"